A 50W X-band GaN Solid State Power Amplifer for Space-borne Applications

A X-band solid-state power amplifier (SSPA) for future payloads has been implemented using GaN Technology in this paper. The main performance of the GaN SSPA is superior to the GaAs SSPA. This paper proposes device level redundancy of GaN along with various techniques such as gain compensation, Automatic level control and different parameter telemetry. The output power of SSPA is greater than 47dBm(50W), and efficiency achieves 35% at X band with 500MHz bandwidth over the temperature range from -40 to +70 deg C. The SSPA has the dimensions of 300mm×190mm×46mm with a weight of 3kg. At the same time, the thermal design and Simulation of SSPA are carried out, and the reliability test is completed.